Instagram passes 80 million users

Instagram have announced that their service has now surpassed 80 million users. The instagram service allows users to take photos, edit them and share them with other friends on instagram or on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram has had a 60% increase in its user count over the past 12 weeks helping it to surpass the 80 million mark. Instagram infrastructure engineer Rick Branson wrote in a tweet “we now have >5.7m users per employee”, with Instagram having only 14 employees, the math is simple, Branson adds “We’re hiring :)”.

Instagram has been around since October 2010 and took just a year and a half to reach 50 million users, a milestone achieved back in April 2012. By that maths it took Instagram just 3 months to add 30 million users to its total, working out at 10 million a month, 330,000 a day, 14,000 an hour, 231 a minute and nearly 4 every second. Their growth is quite substantial and its anyone’s guess if they can sustain such a rapid rate of growth.

Up to now, the 80 million or more Instagram users have shared more than 4 billion photos. Facebook recently acquired Instagram back in April 2012 in a deal worth $1 billion, the takeover seems to coincide nicely with the massive growth Instagram has seen.